The Simultaneous Rise of Last-Minute Travel Planners & Super-Planners

We’ve noticed an interesting trend in our data. Our guides tend to be purchased at the beginning of a trip or several months in advance. There are not many purchases in between those two extremes.

We interviewed our users, researched seemingly conflicting industry trends, and realized that the following things are true:

Travelers are booking more and more last-minute – often making reservations and finding activities while in-destination. Nearly 40% of bookings are actually happening same day or up to 2 days in advance.

Travelers are booking travel and experiences several months in advance and conducting more online research than ever before. The “average” traveler visits 38 websites before booking and spends more than 20 hours planning for a trip.

So what’s the deal? Are people winging it more or becoming super-planners? How should the travel industry service these conflicting behaviors?

Our focus on highly curated content – instead of aggregating everything like many apps do – has helped us be a good solution for both, but for different reasons. The wing-it crowd liked that we did the work for them. The super-planners loved using us as part of their research.

We are going to double down on these use cases to cater to both needs even more. For the super-planner, we are adding a lot more personalization and customization tools in the product – so that our content and tools can be the core of their trip planning. For the wing-it traveler, we are combining advanced filtering and search features with our curated content so that they can quickly figure out what they want to do without sifting through the noise.

We’re still designing exactly how this looks, but I’d love to hear about your process for trip planning. Do you wing-it or super-plan?

Please DM me on Instagram if you would be willing to share how you planned for your last trip: @gokonrad.

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